PEORIA — Allegiant will add a new flight out of Peoria’s airport to Orlando, Fla., beginning in November.

The twice-weekly flights from Gen. Wayne A. Downing Peoria International Airport to Orlando / Sanford International Airport will begin Nov. 14, the company announced Tuesday morning.

They’ll both arrive and depart on Mondays and Fridays, and fares are expected to begin as low as $76.

“We’re connecting people with other nice places to go,” airport director Gene Olson said as he made the official announcement while decked out in a tropical shirt, flanked by faux palm trees and decorative plastic flamingos.

The company began operating out of Peoria in 2006 with flights to Tampa Bay, Fla., and has since added flights to Las Vegas, Phoenix/Mesa in Arizona, and Tampa/St. Petersburg and Punta Gorda in Florida.

This restores a connection that Allegiant had briefly operated twice before, in 2005 and 2007.

Olson said the difficulty in the past was competition from another airline, AirTran, flying a similar route out of Bloomington’s Central Illinois Regional Airport. Allegiant has a similar Orlando service there now, but Olson said this allows each airport to focus on passengers in its region.

The airport has set five straight months of monthly passenger records this year, from March through July. In June the airport hit an all-time high number of passengers. About 57,000 people flew into or out of the airport last month.

Those numbers help with regional economic development, both Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis and state Rep. David Leitch, R-Peoria, said at the event, with Leitch calling a busy airport “essential to the recipe for economic development.”

Ardis said that additional flights not only give central Illinoisans easier access to vacation destinations, they help bring visitors into the Peoria area more easily.